Stories

In early September, Lew Cirne sat down with WebPulp.tv for a half hour interview. In it, Lew talks about the technology behind New Relic and what it takes to constantly collect performance metrics from thousands of applications, simultaneously.

If you're not monitoring your application, you should be ashamed. It's free! Head over to New Relic and try out RPM, today.

Early last week, the Sinatra team announced the release of version 1.1.0. This release brings a dozen or so new rendering methods (support for SCSS, Liquid, Markdown, and more). It also adds before and after filters with pattern matching, access to the top-level settings, and it now works when referenced under a subpath of a Rails 3 application.

Alan deLevie dropped us a line last week to let us know about his 50 line Sinatra app that generates simple HTML documentation of your database schema using ActiveRecord. The output is non-Ruby and since it's built with Sinatra, it's highly customizable.

jQuery Mobile recently had an Alpha release and Jerod Santo quickly put together an article detailing how to get it up and running with a Rails 3 application. It's well written, with step-by-step instructions, screen shots, and examples for how to build a mobile interface for a blog with CRUD support.

If you feel like Capistrano and Vlad the Deployer don't quite meet your deployment needs, you should take a look at Grant Ammons's new project, called Screwcap. Screwcap is a straightforward deployment framework with a simple DSL. And, it does not rely on rake, so that may be useful for some applications.

For projects that were not developed in Ruby, it's arguably more important to properly test them. Todd Huss let us know about his Stand Alone Cucumber test suite designed to do just that. It allows you to build a simple test suite against any external application, which will greatly improve your sanity.

Until now, it's been terribly difficult dynamically to switch between Capybara drivers in your tests. But, with Swinger by Jeff Kreeftmeijer, you can intelligently switch between Webrat and Selenium depending on the needs of any particular test.

Brian Liles wrote up a blog article last week to remind everyone if you’re running Ruby Enterprise Edition, that you need to tune your garbage collector to really take advantage of it’s speed, even in development. Using the settings he provides, he was able to reduce his test suite runtime down from over nine minutes to under six.

Like Twitter's recently roll out of their #newtwitter interface, it's sometimes useful to roll out specific features to small sets of users in your application. And, James Rosen's recent project, called Arturo, was built to do just that. You can set a specific feature to go to a certain percentage of users and it supports whitelists and blacklists to support rollout to certain groups or individuals.